


Can't Miss

by Oyse_Leroy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Basketball, Fantasy, Gen, Sports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oyse_Leroy/pseuds/Oyse_Leroy
Summary: During his senior year on a college basketball team, a bench player becomes the subject of international focus, when he inexplicably goes on the greatest shooting streak in the history of the sport.
Kudos: 2





	Can't Miss

**Author's Note:**

> I've wondered what would happen if a basketball player had a 100% shooting average. This is my idea of the answer to that question. (I happened to complete this on Sunday, January 26, 2020, just before the news broke about Kobe Bryant's passing.) Thanks for reading.

Shooting guard Braylon Jennings was a bench player for his first three years in college. During his freshman year he was only a reserve player. But during his senior year, early in the season, during the very first game in which Braylon saw playing time, he scored 21 points in two minutes and seventeen seconds.

Braylon used a screen from his point guard to get open for the first three-point shot. Coach Knight approved of this decision, since it was intelligent basketball (Braylon used a screen), and the boys were up by 13 in only the middle of the first half. Coach Knight could afford to have a bench player stretch out a little – though only a very little.

During the next possession, off the first pass Braylon received, he jab-stepped his defender, creating space, and pulled up again. Coach Knight cursed at Braylon’s trigger-happiness, though again, his offensive decision exhibited intelligence because he created space between himself and his defender. The shot dropped, all-net.

The home crowd roared in a way that signaled an energy shift in the stadium. The shooting guard, who passed the ball to Braylon, patted him on the back of his head as they jogged to the opposite end of the court and set up on defense. Braylon was now 2 for 2 from the three-point line, with 6 points.

Coach Knight anticipated that on their next possession, Braylon would shoot again, as the crowd had a way of egging on players, and also because the coach taught his men to keep getting the ball to the hot hand. Except Braylon was never hot. The young man worked hard and had a great attitude, he was very coachable, but his output was inconsistent. Coach only kept him on the team as a morale sparkplug for the organization, and also as a personal reminder for Coach Knight that this was an educational institution, not the NBA. Coach was an educator, first and foremost. Basketball made better men, and all of his players deserved the opportunity to become that, talented or otherwise.

The center from the opposing team missed a dunk, which led to Braylon’s team gaining possession and tearing back down court to score on the opposite end, before the defense could get set up down there. Braylon was running a couple of steps behind and to the left of his point guard, who was out front on the fast break. The point guard had an open floor for an easy layup. Instead, he stopped at the 3-point line and passed the ball to Braylon in the corner.

“No!” Coach Knight yelled as he stood up from the bench, pissed. His point guard knew better than to pass up a high-percentage shot like a layup. But once the men took the floor, Coach was no more than a spectator; he couldn’t play the game for them. Coach’s instinct was to pull his point guard out of the game for that decision. But when Braylon dropped that third shot from the corner – triggering the whole gym to roar – Coach realized there was a function of camaraderie in play. This made 9 points for Braylon.

Given the growing score cushion they now had, perhaps Coach could afford to let this one slide. He laughed to himself and shook his head as the opposing coach called a time-out, a strategy intended to break the team’s momentum and to “ice” Braylon, whose teammates encouraged him aggressively: slaps on the butt and head, bumping into him, yelling athletic terms of endearment at him; Braylon’s huge grin is what enabled an untrained eye to distinguish his teammate’s behavior from hostility.

Coach Knight’s boys jogged over to him during the time-out.

“Y’all still know what a high-percentage shot is right?”

Every player nodded and responded with some version of “Yes coach.”

“I’m this close to sitting a couple of y’all down,” Coach lightly threatened. He was careful not to allow his admonition to cross over into discouragement territory, as the team was buzzing. “What’s my rule? If you gun…”

“Put it in the hole,” the whole team replied loudly.

“Speaking of which,” Coach said to Braylon, “did you get some last night Jennings?” This re-elicited Braylon’s grin as the team laughed and manhandled him again.

The strategic timeout did the opposing team no good. On the next possession, Coach Knight’s point guard passed the ball to the power forward, who was in the low post fighting for position. He couldn’t establish it, and passed the ball back out to the point guard, who immediately transferred it to Braylon at the three-point line on the opposite side of the court. This time Braylon’s defender was closer, harassing him aggressively. The crowd started chanting something undecipherable.

Braylon dribbled to shake his defender, who was tenacious and managed to tap the ball away from Braylon, but Braylon quickly recovered the ball and pulled up for another distance shot, before his defender could reposition. Thwack. All-net. 12 points.

The noise in the gym was deafening. Coach Knight watched Braylon’s frustrated defender get yelled at by his coach from the sidelines. Then Coach Knight made eye contact with Braylon, who shrugged, and held both hands out to his sides as he jogged down court – a gesture made famous by Michael Jordan during one of his legendary shooting clinics. Then Coach Knight flashed a flabbergasted look to his own assistant coach, who grinned and shook her head.

On the next play, two defenders double-teamed Braylon, leaving one of his teammates open, to whom Braylon passed the ball. The teammate scored.

Coach Knight clapped. “That’s basketball!”

In their next play, Braylon moved without the ball, “sweeping” the baseline, running through the players in the low post to use them as obstacles to his trailing defender. This created enough space for Braylon to catch and immediately shoot the ball when he popped out on the other side. The ball rolled around the rim, looked as if it might come out, and finally dropped. Braylon now had 15 points, 5 for 5 from the outside.

The opposing team’s coach called another timeout and replaced Braylon’s defender with another guy, as surely Braylon’s anomalous shooting streak was a matter of incompetent defense.

During the opposing team’s next possession, when their point guard inbounded the ball toward Braylon’s assignment, Braylon managed to intercept the inbound pass, get out on the break, and get off another three-point shot while being fouled hard from behind and knocked to the floor. The shot went in.

Braylon’s angry team cleared the bench, ready to fight, and had to be restrained by staff and referees. The crowd’s cheer for the made basket morphed into booing for poor sportsmanship on the part of Braylon’s defender, who the refs ejected from the game and awarded Braylon free throws. After he managed to recover from the hardwood, Braylon made all three free throws, after which Coach Knight finally sat him down to a standing ovation. 21 points.

“What was that Jennings?” the assistant coach asked him on the bench.

“I don’t know coach,” Braylon admitted to her. He really didn’t know. Maybe it was simply his three years of practice diligence finally paying off in hand-eye coordination. Braylon practiced more in the neighborhood gym than he did in the college facility. On his own (which he preferred), sometimes late at night (which his lack of a social life afforded), or during the day between classes, Braylon logged 2 hours of personal practice nearly every day, for three years, in addition to his team practice requirements. His kinesthetic intelligence was not very high to begin with, as he was never a natural athlete, and in his three years of personal training he had somehow managed to improve only moderately. A normal-minded player would have knocked off the extra after a year of little results. But Braylon considered himself a scientist (his major was sports physiology), and his tenacity was more about data collection that could serve him in his real job after he graduated, than some misplaced hope that he could design himself into a Steph Curry through force of will. He also loved basketball particularly (only it and billiards), just like his mother, who also played college ball back in the day.

At six-foot-one, 175 pounds, Braylon knew he would never be drafted into the NBA, and the odds of that were so ridiculous for anybody as far as he was concerned, that he considered it a sign of low intelligence for anyone other than a LeBron James type to even entertain such foolishness. Black people who really thought they were going to become famous rappers or pro athletes embarrassed him, especially when (as was the usual reality) their abilities came nowhere near matching what fame would require.

The gym buzzer interrupted Braylon’s self-reflection. He felt sweat from his chin drip down to his knee, and realized that he had never sweat during a game; there was no cause. Braylon had never seen double-digit minutes in playing time, and tonight was probably no exception, though Braylon lost track of the clock pretty early on when his streak started. It was a surreal, out-of-body experience.

Braylon stood up from the bench and used a towel to wipe the sweat from his head and neck, as the team made their way to the locker room for half-time, with players getting physical with Braylon as expressions of congratulations and camaraderie, while jogging through the tunnel.

Coach Knight’s half-time speech in the locker room made Braylon uncomfortable, as the Coach touted Braylon’s performance in a way that could encourage resentment and jealousy from his teammates. It made him self-conscious, especially since, Braylon figured, his performance wasn’t replicable.

He was wrong.

For the next 12 games in a row, Braylon did not miss a single shot. During that period, his lowest scoring in a night (game 3) was 45 points. His highest (game 12) was 62. In every instance, Braylon shot 100% from the field. Division I College basketball had never seen anything like it. By the time the team got to Braylon’s fourth game, people were buying tickets (and tuning in to broadcasts) just to see if and when he would finally miss.

During this phenomenon, Braylon never played an entire game and was never a starter, as Coach Knight didn’t want to jinx whatever was happening. The closest to a scientific approach for Coach, in this instance, was to alter no variables, to change nothing. He maintained this decision in spite of pressure from the university to place Braylon in the starting five. “Am I still the head coach?” was the question that put the discussion to rest.

The international press converged on the university and on Coach. So did sports psychologists. Everyone wanted to know how this was happening, and they were all inclined to credit Coach Knight for Braylon’s performance. To coach’s credit, he admitted that he had no idea why Braylon had been able to sustain such a statistically improbable feat. Coach’s general line was that he trained all his players the same, that what they did with the information was up to them, and that Braylon could speak to his own performance better than Coach could.

Investigators did not find Braylon’s comments much more enlightening, but he was something of a sound-bite machine. “I don’t know,” Braylon said flatly at a press conference. “I just practice a lot. A lot-lot. But I’ve been doing that for three years and this is only now kicking in, so I’m guessing practice ain’t the whole of it, and there’s some kind of x-factor at play here. I’m as puzzled as you. I can’t control what I can’t identify, so who knows how long this thing is gonna ride. I didn’t anticipate becoming a circus act.” The attendees laughed lightly.

What Braylon neglected to share was the sense that, even when he knew that he was distracted and his shooting mechanics didn’t feel right in his own body – like during the hard foul he took from the back in game 1 – the shot still dropped. Strangely, it always felt like absolutely anything he put up would fall. That was impossible to explain to anyone, and who would believe it? Then again, Braylon realized, the evidence spoke for itself. His father, a physicist, had a saying: “If it happens, then it must be possible.”

Braylon concluded his remarks to the press by saying, “I hope it’s not becoming a distraction for the organization.” Of course Braylon knew the opposite to be true, that his fluky shooting streak generated great press for the university, and probably translated into revenue indirectly, though as a non-business major he wouldn’t grasp the particulars of how that worked. A few friends had been pushing Braylon to “get paid” from all this, which he found annoying. Braylon remembered a lawsuit brought against a university recently by college athletes who believed that they should be paid. Braylon considered that to be a common-sense truth; colleges made money off of athletes, so on what grounds was the idea of them cashing in on themselves ridiculous? But in his own case he considered it to be a premature conversation. And Braylon could do without the national-dialogue thrashing he would undoubtedly receive if he tried to pull a filthy-lucre move. Drops a few shots and now he thinks he’s God’s gift to basketball. There was no dragging like the kind a viral subject got when the public turned on him. No thanks.

As cashing in was concerned, a couple of sports agents had contacted Braylon’s parents for a “conversation” after game 3 of the streak. But Braylon had the mind not to make much of it, since a bizarre streak of luck did not a career make. Coach Knight co-signed Braylon’s assessment, advising him not to let opportunists distract him, and to simply play his game.

And play he did: three-point shots, two-point shots, jumpers and layups, even a dunk after he stole the ball from his assignment in a half-court offense. Whether he was double-teamed by defenders, fouled hard by dirty and resentful players, shooting from physically altered positions because of the aggressive defense, or certain that he would miss because of his lack of confidence, everything that Braylon Jennings put up dropped – until game 13 of his streak.

Social media chatter and sports industry talking heads spoke of 13 as the bad luck number that might have undid Braylon. (In the absence of real answers, people came up with things.) In retrospect Braylon had no answers; the streak went as unpredictably as it came. He finally missed a free throw, of all things. Braylon wondered whether irony were the proper label for that, given the volume of impossible shots he had made over the course of 12 games. But ever since a famous rock singer got ridiculed for erroneously defining the word “ironic” in a song, Braylon avoided using it just in case.

There were no awards-proper for shooting streaks in basketball. However Braylon could count his viral fame, and more formally, an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, as notable life takeaways from the experience. Braylon scored a total of 775 points during The Streak. And he continued to shoot above 63% from the field after the streak, which was by no means shabby. Further, as a result of his good attitude (even more so than his post-streak consistency of output), Coach Knight increased Braylon’s playing time from the bench to an average of 12 minutes. Braylon could tell that his defensive matchups across the board respected him more (not playing him as loosely as they did prior to The Streak), as they didn’t know if or when he might do it again (he never did), and no competitor wanted to be “posterized.”

Braylon’s team was knocked out of the playoffs in the first round, and true to Braylon’s self-assessment, his basketball career ended after college. His streak did lead to a TED Talk eventually, and it made for great conversation during job interviews, one of which led to a sports physiology position with his hometown’s NBA franchise. Several organizations offered him gigs as a shooting coach, which he turned down on the basis of the fact that he had never determined the ‘how’ of The Streak, which made it indistinguishable from luck. It was a really long, bizarre streak of luck. Hanging out a shingle for coaching based on that, Braylon felt, would be the equivalent of false advertising.

The Streak did, however, make Braylon’s professional career post-basketball, which would qualify it as a “blessing” in Judeo-Christian terms. His late mother, a pastor with a doctorate in Theology, certainly would have thought so. Braylon got his trans-atomic leanings from her, and his more empirical tendencies from his physicist father.

Interesting that those two got together, Braylon thought to himself during one Memorial Day visit to his mom’s grave. Looking over at his father, who was cleaning off her tombstone, Braylon decided to share his thought.

“Interesting that you two got together.”

His father’s eyes stayed on the tombstone. “Yeah?”

“Yeah like the…,” Braylon did the weighing-scales gesture with his hands, “mystical and the scientific.”

His father smiled to himself. “You do know yo momma was smarter than me right? Is smarter.”

“Oh I’m not saying she wasn’t sharp pop, I don’t mean it like that.”

“I know what you’re saying.” His father squinted and nodded. “She knew everything I knew, but I didn’t know the half of her world.” A flicker of ache flashed across his eyes.

“What do you think she would’ve made of my senior year?”

His father laughed to himself, in a way that felt and sounded like he hadn’t done it in a while. “Well, you know yo momma wasn’t the spooky type of theologian.”

“Not, at, all.”

“Yeah. She didn’t even wanna be a pastor. Her plan was to be a bible translator.”

“What? How do I not know this?”

“I got a 30-year jump on ya.” Braylon’s father smirked warmly at his wife’s tombstone.

“Wow,” Braylon processed. "So why'd she go into pastoring?"

"She said she was following instructions." Braylon's father smiled warmly to himself, then faced Braylon. 

“As far as your streak goes? Well...she does love basketball."


End file.
